NMD 442 Sophia C-C

The complete prototype can be viewed here My classmate and I were paired up to work on designing an app that would work as a way to connect people with snow-filled driveways and plow guys.  I have been working on generating the prototype to show to potential developers and/or user.  I did this using photoshop to make the screens, and then putting them into a prototype generator called inVision. When we were discussing how we wanted the app to function, we heavily referenced the About.me onboarding system, but integrated some of the critiques we had of it, namely the ability to see how long the process will be and navigation between tabs of the process.  The design we came up with uses a series of dots on the bottom of the screen, as shown. The current screen's dot is highlighted in yellow, showing the user where they are in the onboarding process.  If the user wants to go back to a previous page, they simply tap on the associated dot and it brings them ba...

  Click here for article This article discusses some of the most irksome 'dark patterns' often found in UX.  I selected this article mainly because of the Star Wars reference in the beginning, but I also liked the points it brought up.  At the beginning of the semester I spent 3 hours dealing with Adobe customer service because it looked like they were automatically continuing my Creative Cloud subscription(at more than 100 dollars more than I initially agreed to).  Upon investigation, I had agreed to these terms in the fine print of the student discount promotion.  When I tried to cancel my account, there was no way to do so on the website.  I had to spend more time dealing with customer service, who didn't let me cancel, but did give me the discount again.  This cycle of payment is not sustainable, the only way I managed it this year was that I had gotten a different debit card between automatic payments.  In a utopian view, I do not have...

Click here for the article The article focuses on FaceBook's personalization and the idea of 'dead end UX'  The author has turned their FaceBook feed into effectively a news reader by unfollowing all of their friends.  Now they are unable to undo this action, making Facebook unusable.  The follow/unfollow feature of FaceBook is something my family and I have made great use of in the past year, with some unforseen consequences that are similar to those encountered by the author.  Last election season, my mother unfollowed her mother because the daily unintentionally racist posting was becoming too much.  A couple months later my great uncle died and my grandmother posted about about his death, which my mom obviously did not see.  I had to call my mom to tell her so that she in turn could call my grandmother to give her condolences.  If I hadn't done that, my mother would not have known about her uncle's death and would have ended up hurting my gr...

Click here to view article The way the process was broken up made it easy to understand and glean useful information from, which was appreciated.  There wasn't really any new  information, it mostly just cemented things we had discussed in 102 and in class discussions in this class.  Discussion Questions: Is it possible to design effectively without true empathy? Rather, is there a way to imitate empathy? What tests could we devise to use with this SnowPlow Uber idea? What would an effective prototype look like for the Snow Plow Uber?

The article this post is responding to is no longer able to be found, so the hyper-link has been removed to avoid confusion. The article raises some interesting points if you look past the all too common concerns about internet addiction, namely is there a responsibility to avoid falling into 'Dark UX'?  The idea of dark UX is that people who know certain design tricks such as making specific buttons larger, or changing an animation to make scrolling smoother (i.e. UX designers) can use these tricks to make using an app more mindless and... well addictive is really the only word that comes to mind.  The final parts of the article discuss the role of the UX designer: should there be a sort of expectation to do no harm?  Or should it just be accepted that as they are contractors, they will do what the client asks? I think that a pseudo Hippocratic oath for UX designers is a nice idea, but not entirely practical.  The job of a UX designer is to make an experi...

click here for article First off, the idea of guerrilla usability testing is extremely funny to me:  a method of  testing a website or app that involves "pouncing on lone people in cafes and public spaces, quickly filming them whilst they use a website for a couple of minutes.”  The mental image is ludicrous enough to actually seem feasible.   As for her actual prototyping and redesign process, there were again some interesting takeaways for me.  The job stories that allow you to better analyze what people want to do with an app was a practice I had not thought of, and the idea of 'pain points' seems like a useful tool that I will be able to utilize in my job.  The discovery of the pain points provides specific goals to troubleshoot, as opposed to wandering blindly, which I appreciate.   Discussion questions Would guerrilla usability testing be feasible for the snow plowing app? why/why not? What tasks would it make sense t...

  Click here for articl e I appreciated how the article laid out a process of app creation in very simple layman terms, it helped me feel more confident in how to approach our snow plow Uber project.  Based on the article, we've already taken some of the initial steps, i.e. the 'elevator pitch' of "It's like Uber but for plowing."  I enjoyed the examples the author gave of her sketches and how she showed their transition into a fully formed prototype.  I think I like the style tile model better than the mood board just because it seems more fleshed out and easier to apply to a product.   Discussion Questions: What would the snow plowing project have as a design inception sheet?  What sort of moodboard/style tile would it have? How could you make sure the visual language used in the product resonates with the largest number of users?  Are there certain aspects that are interpreted the same regardless of who looks at them?  O...

Click here for article The metrics Google created for its designers to use as a guideline, HEART, is part of what makes the Google suite so powerful and pervasive.  The goal of the rubric is to build a system that is more effective at carrying out its intended purpose[Task success] thereby satisfying a user[Happiness] as well as encouraging them to want to use it more often[Engagement], become loyal to it[Adoption], and to continue to use it[Retention].  The result of this is the Google suite that has become standard for school systems, workplaces, and personal affairs.  I have not used Microsoft office since my sophomore year of highschool, mainly because using Google Drive is simply easier and more convenient; I can access whatever I'm working on from any computer or smartphone that has an internet connection.  The Google suite is simple and nearly seamless to use, and upon finding their rubric for product development, how they achieved this product makes mo...

Click here for article After reading this article multiple times I was left with a general feeling of confusion.  I generally don't like ucdesign.cc's articles.  They tend to be poorly written and difficult for me to understand.  I was able to glean some interesting things out of the article however.  I did not know that Netflix followed the scientific method while executing product tests, and while it makes perfect sense, it is not something that had occurred to me as a possibility.  One of the graphics in the article was intriguing because I could see exactly why it had the results that it did. I first saw the image when I skimmed the article and had a visceral reaction to the default artwork.  It just feels like there is too much motion and chaos in the image, whereas the most popular image is extremely visually appealing. Discussion Questions: One of Chen's points was to pay as much if not more attention to what a user does  as w...

Click here for article I thought that the source of this article was interesting because it was written by the director of research of Intercom, the website that produced the article.  In part of the article she discusses how sketching revealed a critical problem with the development of their company's product; the people working together on it did not have a common goal or vocabulary with which to discuss it, and no-one really had any idea until they did this sketching exercise.  I like seeing how the way that I think and process information is something that can be used in professional settings, not just me explaining my weird idea for a two-headed dragon to someone.   Completely unrelated to the actual article, but the animation of the line that told the reader how close to the end of the article was really well implemented.   Discussion Questions: What would the 'dog bone' look like for someone who lived on campus?  If there were to be a...

Click here for article I thought that the name of the article (Metrics Versus Experience) was interesting simply because the first point of the article was "don't frame stuff as 'Metrics Versus Experience.'"  The actual content of the article was a nice insight into something I am only barely aware of:  the metrics used to analyze the success of a website or product.  I have interacted with them in terms of Instagram(there is a feature that lets you see how many people have seen a post and how many people have interacted with a post, and how those numbers stack up against your other posts) and Google analytics(which lets you see where people who access your website are from and how they are getting to the site), but I have never had to use them to better execute a product.  In Zhou's article, she talks about different ways to figure out which metrics you should actually track, and I liked the way she explained it because it's similar to the way I te...

The concepts discussed in Dan Norman's were interesting because I hadn't consciously noticed them, but as soon as he brought up an example it made total sense.  It reminded me of Bill Moggridge's iceberg metaphor-- I subconsciously understood, appreciated, and experienced these elements but never applied conscious brain effort into noticing them.  That is a skill I want to work on in the future: making a concerted effort to look at the design that goes into what I encounter on a day to day basis.   I like to think of myself as a sort of designer, as I have been masterminding my own knitting and sewing projects for years.  More recently I have been trying to extend my design work into app and/or game design, and I think that the elements of design he outlines, specifically the visceral and behavioral elements will be useful to keep in mind and cater to in that work.       

Bill Moggridge's talk about his book 'Interaction Design - Beyond Human-Computer Interaction' A short series of eulogies. The Moggridge videos we watched this week were useful in that they gave more context to the first one we watched('What is Design?'), which looks to be a condensed version of his Stanford talk (Designing Interactions).  I liked the interviews that he filmed and included in the talk;  hearing more about the design process that went into Google's home page was fascinating, especially their system of adding things.  I had not given any thought to how streamlined a search engine really should be, I think that may be part of what I dislike about Bing.  Bing's home page is cluttered with images and links, making it less appealing to use. Bing's homepage The second video, the compilation of people's remembrances, didn't really provide any technical knowledge, instead it provided more insight on who Moggridge was.  Th...

What is Design?  lecture by Bill Moggridge Based on this week's assignment, I think I will find the textbook helpful due to the technical information it provides, but will find the videos and articles a better source for concepts and ideas. I really appreciated the the model of phone call services and the activities presented in the text; I think that they provided a way of thinking about design that I will be able to apply to challenges given in class. The list of roles that emerged as interactions became more complex and required more diverse skills was interesting, I had never heard of an information architect or a usability engineer, but those roles being specialized ones makes a lot of sense. Bill Moggridge's talk was helpful in that it cemented some concepts that I had a tangential grasp on, as well as pointing out things I had barely considered.  I think my favorite thing he talked about was his iceberg metaphor: that the things that can be consciously taught a...